Month: September 2014

Because of the importance of content for us, we decided to pursue other ways to make our project stronger. We talked to several different people and film crews about the possibility of making a video. This was when we met Sohrab Shah-Mohammadlou. Sohrab and his brother Kaveh were both environmental activists. They knew a lot about Iran’s wildlife and nature. We saw some of their work; they had made beautiful videos about Iran’s nature and wildlife and had taste and goals similar to us. We decided to work with this team and for the first video, we asked them to make a short film about Shemshak, Dizin and Darbandsar to show the world these three ski resorts, which are popular in winter and hangout spots during the warmer months of the year. The result was a spectacular video that went from summer to winter and showed life in these three resorts, which are only 45 minutes from Tehran. The video became a hit on YouTube and was shared hundreds of times on various social media platforms. We were proud to have created such a professional video about Iran and excited about making more videos about Iran. We hope our next videos will be shared thousands of times.

Next week we have a surprise for you, so stay tuned for news about it on Life.

A short video introduction to the three most popular ski resorts in Iran: Dizin, Shemshak and Darbandsar. These three resorts are frequented by Iranians and international skiers during winter.

Dizin is the largest ski resort in Iran and one of the 40 highest ski resorts in the world with a ski season that lasts from mid-November to mid-May.

Shemshak is the second largest ski resort in Iran and usually attracts more advanced skiers.

Darbandsar is one of the newest ski resorts in Iran and the second most challenging resort in the region after Shemshak.

Our team expanded to include Taraneh Salehi, who came to us via recommendation and who had years of experience in accounting in Iran. She took on the role of financial adviser and began structuring the Accounting Department.

Golnaz Khaleghi came to us via social media ads. We chose her as she had experience in content management and data entry and soon realized she was also a right fit for our team. She introduced us to Safoura Sadeqianpour, whom we chose for HR and Administration due to her energy and life experience abroad. Vahid introduced us to Mohammad Rostami who joined our Development team.

As we moved towards our launch date, our team began working longer hours and almost every day of the week. Despite the enormous stress levels, everyone was excited about the project bearing fruit.

On September 21, we launched our website. It was a beautiful moment seeing the result of eight months of hard work. Our team took on a massive project on a national scale, we grew together, learned together and we became a family. One for all and all for one.

The idea behind toiran.com was and is to show the people of the world the wonders of Iran and provide them with services that will allow them to experience mysterious Iran for themselves.

We now need the support of every single one of you, our loyal fans, who have stayed with us throughout this incredible journey. Help us to make Iran great.

We realized there was a lot of work to be done. No one had ever gathered this information on such a scale before. So either nothing had been done before or the information was outdated or wrong. This meant we had to go to every corner of the country ourselves to gather information.

We decided to once again expand the team. At this time our priority was the development team. Our past experience had proven finding good developers in Iran difficult so we asked Salman to find us new team members.

The resumes Salman passed on to us were what we were looking for. Salman spoke highly of these experienced Back-End and UI developers and said he could guarantee the quality of their work.

I knew we still had a long way to go and needed to work on many things. But the hope I had, motivated me.

We had a great team but we still needed to look for young, talented, and energetic individuals to expand our team, because there was a lot to do and we needed more help.

As Shahin got ready for more road trips, we focused on organizing office work so that we could better sort through the data gathered on trips.

We realized we need to be more active in social media and marketing and become stronger. Social media is an important part of our project because we believe any good project needs a good foundation and a great strategy and this was the reason for our tireless 8-month efforts. We didn’t want to start like a weak team and then look for solutions to become strong we wanted to start strong.

We placed new ads on our social media platforms to find new people to grow our team. One of the people who came to us through these ads was Omid Mohammadi. He had worked in different technological fields, had knowledge of different gadgets and even had experience in Web Development. He was chosen for his experience in social media and because he was young and energetic. We soon realized we had chosen the right person and continued our online activities with his help.

We began the next round of road trips. This time we chose Mazandaran. Heidi, Shahin and one of the boys in IT volunteered to go.

We began our trip from the Firouzkouh Road and headed toward Sari, making stops along the way to capture the natural attractions of northern Iran on the way. Locals were extremely kind and were always ready to stop for a quick chat and to point us in the right direction. Often we would receive invitations to their homes to join them for meals.

We arrived in Sari where we met Hamed Tizrooyan, one of the young nature photographers who had been contributing to our project for some time. Hamed is a talented photographer and environmental activist. He accompanied the team in Sari for two days and helped photographing the natural and historical attractions of the city.

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>After Sari, we moved on to 10 other cities including Amol, Babol, Babolsar, Baladeh and Yoush. Every city we stopped in took our breath away with its natural beauty; astounding cities which had each formed and grown in valleys, around waterfalls and near ancient forests. These became some of our fondest memories of northern Iran.

The only thing that marred our experience was the tragic scene of the trees illegally felled in one of the virgin forests we passed through.

The car we used on this trip was Shahin’s car. The car broke down twice while on the road. So toiran.com decided to buy the team a new car. The car we needed had to be spacious, and suitable for off road trips. We needed a car to help us discover Iran, go on rough roads, travel mountain passes and take us on long distance road trips. We asked around and finally found a Toyota Fortuner. We got the toiran logo on the car. Now wherever we went people knew who we were, and some would even come and ask us questions. This is exactly what we wanted: to get all Iranians involved in this project.

Our workload increased by the day, our ideas grew bigger and our team needed more members to tread the path it had envisioned for itself. We placed ads on LinkedIn and other social media platforms and asked friends and acquaintances to help us find a development team. Many people came and went. Some even stayed with our team for a while as interns but after a month despite all the promises that had been made they couldn’t achieve anything. Everything became more complicated than the beginning because building something from scratch is much easier than fixing something that has been built wrong. What were we supposed to do? We were returning to where we were a month before.

We were struggling with these concerns when someone suggested a PHP developer named Salman Akbari to us. We invited Salman to the office for an interview he radiated positive energy and was very experienced despite his young age. We decided to invite Salman to join our team.

The only problem was that Salman was doing his national service and could only come to the office part time.

With Salman on board, the Development team now consisted of him, Hamid Beiki as Graphic Designer and Mohammad Ghayati as IT Consultant. He started work by choosing a new theme.

Hooman introduced us to Farbod Morshedzadeh, who is one of the most talented painters in Iran and has held several exhibitions. Farbod is studying for a PhD in History of Art and he proposed we have an Iranology class so that the team would learn more about Iran, its history, culture, art and architecture. The toiran team eagerly welcomed this suggestion and we began our classes starting with the history of ancient Persia. The Iranology classes increased our knowledge and allowed us to come together as a team and learn about Iran-the reason we were here in the first place. These classes and discussions brought us closer in our thinking and led to new ideas.

We also asked Hooman Nobakht to hold a photography class for us to enable us to document and share our experiences when traveling in Iran. This also allowed the technology, art and cultural departments to learn about one another’s work and had a positive effect on team spirit and our teamwork. These classes taught us the fundamentals of photography and smartphone photography, which was good for our team.